The modern-day town of Port Royal, Jamaica, bears little evidence of its spectacular past. In Port Royal Jamaica, Pawson and Buisseret detail the establishment of the town of Port Royal in the second half of the seventeenth century, in the heyday of privateering. The town was critical to the successful colonization of Jamaica by the British and pivotal to British mercantile activity, but is best known for the activities of its swashbuckling pirates.

Creolization, the process of cultural interchange--in this case, between peoples of the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean--is an important aspect of the American experience. Language, literature, food, dress, and social relations are all affected by the interplay of cultures. Only recently, though, have scholars fully begun to understand creolization as a mutual exchange rather than the acculturation of colonized peoples to a dominant culture.
Focusing on diverse settings and different aspects of culture, five scholars here examine the process of creolization: its origins, historical and modern meanings of the term, and the various manifestations of the complex, continuing process of cultural exchange and adaptation that began when Africans, American Indians, and Europeans came into contact with each other. While the authors vary in their approaches and, in some respects, their conclusions, they essentially agree that the notion of cultural syncretism--whether described as acculturation or creolization--is a conceptual tool of crucial importance for analyzing the interchange that occurred between peoples of Europe and the Americas.
Contributors to this ground-breaking volume and their respective chapters are David Buisseret, "The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica"; Daniel H. Usner,
Jr., "The Facility Offered by the Country': The Creolization of Agriculture in the Lower Mississippi Valley"; Mary L. Galvin, "Decoctions for Carolinians: The Creation of a Creole Medicine Chest in Colonial South Carolina"; Richard Cullen Rath, "Drums and Power: Ways of Creolizing Music in Coastal South Carolina and Georgia, 1730-1790"; and J. L. Dillard, "The Evidence for Pidgin Creolization in Early American English." Buisseret also contributes an introduction that places the other articles within the context of recent scholarship on creolization

Churchman or merchant, soldier or sanitary engineer, everyone who lives in a city sees it differently. Envisioning the City explores how these points of urban view have been expressed in city plans from various times and places. Ranging from vertical plans to bird's-eye views, profiles, and three-dimensional models, these diverse maps all show cities "the way people want to see them".

The type of plan chosen and its focus reflect the aspects of a city that the map's creators wished to highlight. For instance, the earliest city plans known -- Chinese vertical plans from the first millennium B.C. -- reflected the Chinese ideal of the city, regardless of whether the actual cities depicted were so precisely planned, whereas bird's-eye view plans appended to a fifteenth-century edition of Ptolemy's Geography offered a different attitude toward urban space, one shaped by an aesthetic appreciation of classical and ecclesiastical buildings. City maps in early modern Spain served the ideological needs of churchmen and royal officials, but the military objective of deterring potential attackers led to the creation of different plans from the same time period, which depicted cities as impregnable fortifications. Military concerns were also reflected to some extent in the city models constructed for Louis XIV of France; the shrewd strategist Napoleon praised these highly detailed models as "the best maps that we have". And Daniel Burnham's famous 1909 Plan of Chicago used a distinct representational style to "sell" his version of the new Chicago.

Although city plans are among the oldest maps known, few books have been devoted to them. Historians of cartography and geography, architects, andurban planners will all enjoy this profusely illustrated volume.

"The authors write authoritatively and crisply . . . . How to use maps in teaching is spelled out carefully, but the authors also manage to sketch in the background of American mapping so the book is both a manual and a history. Commentaries are sprinkled with stimulating new ideas, for instance on how to use bird's-eye views and country atlases in the classroom, and there are didactic discussions on maps showing the walking city and the impact of the street car.
"An extraordinarily wide range of maps is depicted, which makes for good browsing, pondering and close study. . . . This is a very good, highly attractive, and worthwhile book; it will have great impact on the use of old (and new!) maps in teaching. As well, this is a tantalizing survey of mapping the United States and will whet the appetites of students and encourage them to learn more about maps and their origins."--John Warketin, "Cartographica"

"A distinctive and skillful effort to bring facets of Illinois history to a popular as well as an academic audience."—John Hoffman, Illinois Historical Survey, University of Illinois Library